The Meteor Observation on ISS (Meteor) project, led by Michael Fortenberry of the Southwest Research Institute, has provided a downward-looking view of the annual light show visiting our skies August 11-12.

Imagery from the Meteor’s high sensitivity, high-definition TV camera installed in the International Space Station’s (ISS) Window Observational Research Facility has been released courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

The Meteor project’s camera made its first observations on July 7, 2016.

Photo of Meteor installed in the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF) Simulator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. This is how it should look given its installation on the International Space Station.Credit: Southwest Research Institute/Chiba Institute of Technology

No clouds my lady!

“The Meteor team is very excited to start making observations on the ISS,” said co-investigator Tomoko Arai of Japan’s Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology. “We will focus on photometric observations for the first year. In our second year, spectroscopic observations will be made.”

The camera also can improve estimates of how much material is actually entering Earth’s atmosphere.

According to the Earth Observatory website, “some of the dust associated with these meteors is so tiny that it burns high in the atmosphere—where it is visible from the space station but not detectable from the ground. Moreover, the space camera has the opportunity to observe meteors during 560 minutes of darkness over 16 orbits of Earth per day, a view that is never obstructed by clouds.”

Shower streak

Published on Aug 12, 2016, a video was acquired August 10, 2016 from high-resolution video camera gear onboard the ISS.

Within the span of about 10 seconds, two meteors associated with the Perseid meteor shower streak across the sky above Pakistan. Video was provided by Tomoko Arai/Japan’s Planetary Exploration Research Center/Meteor Composition Determination (Meteor) investigation.